What’s This News About a Tiny, Ecofriendly Nuclear Power-Plant That Could Save the World?

A few days ago, Lockheed Martin announced progress on a design for a nuclear power-plant that can be built at small scale, maybe tractor-trailer-size, and will produce almost no radioactive waste. Lockheed’s team is saying it expects to have a workable reactor within five years. If that were to happen, the world would literally change: The fossil-fuel business would immediately be halfway to obsolescence because electrical power would soon become (as they used to say in the ‘50s) “too cheap to meter.” Coal would become an antique fuel, used in the odd pizza oven; super-cheap electricity would lead us to retire most gasoline and diesel engines. Carbon pollution, not to mention the politics of oil-producing countries, would become pretty nearly trivialproblems.

How can that work? What is fusionpower?

Broadly, it is the alternative to fission, the process that today’s nuclear power-plants use. Fission plants amass very heavy atoms (usually of uranium isotopes) and cause them to split, emitting high-energy particles, and thus, a lot of energy. That energy is used to boil water, and the steam is used to turn a generator and makeelectricity.

Fusion power-plants would work on a different principle: Very light atoms (usually hydrogen isotopes called deuterium and tritium) would be made to collide, combining to form slightly heavier atoms (specifically,helium) and spinning off neutrons. That reaction, too, releases a great deal of energy, and in fact, a similar fusion process powers thesun.

So why would that be any better thanfission?

Because a fission reactor’s byproducts are extremely radioactive, many to a degree that will be dangerous for centuries. The products of a fusion reaction are much more benign — a little bit of ordinary helium, plus a lot of neutrons. Something has to soak up the neutrons and then be disposed of, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as toxic as the stuff (like plutonium) that comes out of a fission reaction. Also, a fusion reaction cannot run out of control: If something goes wrong, the plasma quickly cools and the whole thing just stops. There cannot be a meltdown in a fusionplant.

Hasn’t this been on the horizon foryears?

Sure. There have been programs at Princeton, Los Alamos, and the University of California for decades, and the Soviet Union and the U.K. had similar projects going. Over the past 40 years, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has built several large test machines, called tokamaks, after a Russian prototype, that have inched closer to the goal of a working power-plant. (My father spent hiscareer working on those projects at PPPL, retiring in 1999.) Most current research hopes are pinned on a test machine called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, under construction in France. It’ll be switched on around 2020, by which time it will have cost at least $50 billion. A lot of people in the field are concerned about that number. As Dr. Bruno Coppi, a plasma physicist from MIT, noted to me this week, a competing smaller and cheaper approach — whether Lockheed’s or anyone else’s — is almost surely a good thing for thefield.

Wasn’t there some big fusion breakthrough back in the’80s?

You may be thinking of “cold fusion,” a notorious (and very different) process. In 1989, two scientists with an experiment at the University of Utah, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced that they’d come up with a way to produce fusion power at tabletop scale with simple materials. They made the key mistake of calling a press conference before submitting their project for peer review and getting a huge amount of attention upfront. Within days, other scientists pointed out that they’d made fundamental errors, and their work was discredited and their careers effectively ended. Further research on cold fusion — just to double-check that Fleischmann and Pons hadn’t happened upon something after all — has not beenfruitful.

Will any of this actually come topass?

There’s a wry saying among energy researchers: “Fusion power is ten years away … and always will be.” That’s because it faces severe practical hurdles. To get a fusion reaction started, you need to heat the fuel to about 10 million degrees, producing the superheated gas known as plasma. (The operating temperature is many times hotter than that.) At those temperatures, it can be contained only with extremely large and powerful electromagnets, and it tends to worm its way out of confinement and dissipate. So far, tokamaks have been able to produce enormous and very brief single pulses of energy but cannot produce power over time as an electrical-generation plant would. So far, they consume more electricity than theymake.

There is also a secondary problem: A fusion reaction produces high-energy neutrons and alpha particles, and the neutrons in particular bore into the metals used in the machinery itself, making them brittle and eventually causing them tocrack.

So what did Lockheed figureout?

That is somewhat unclear because the team left a lot of detail out of the press release and has produced no peer-reviewed papers. However, a look at the site reveals some clues, and they suggest that Lockheed is producing a variant of an old design, one that precedes the tokamak era. In the 1950s, several smallish experimental devices called mirror machines were built. The basic design was fairly simple: a big copper coil that created a magnetic field, with a stronger electromagnet at each end. A plasma held in the center of the coil was further confined by the two magnets, which were only somewhat effective. In this new variation, the coil is made not of copper, but of a superconductor — one of the high-tech materials that, kept extremely cold, exhibit zero resistance to electricity. It can thus make a lot more magnetic field while using less juice, increasing the likelihood that you’re building a power plant rather than apower-consumer.

Sounds promising. What’s wrong withthat?

Well, two things. The point of those old designs was for the plasma to heat up the casing around the whole coil, and that heat would in turn drive the power plant. You can’t do that, though, if you are simultaneously cooling the whole shell to keep the superconducting magnet working. On top of that, the neutrons streaming out of a fusion reaction also destroy superconductivity, and would thus bring this machine to a halt. These sound like pretty basicproblems.

Are they insurmountable?

The Lockheed team is implying, cagily, that it’s got clever solutions to those and various other secondary complexities. The most detailed interview so farsuggests that the team is at least aware of those and other challenges that it faces, and further implies some progress toward solving them. For example, shielding the superconducting coil can be managed — but the researchers suggest that the shield would be about ten feet thick, making a reactor that would weigh a couple of hundred tons. You couldn’t put that on a truck, as the initial announcement implies. There’s a lot of promise here, definitely. If I were betting, though, I wouldn’t sell the ExxonMobil stock justyet.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, uses an unofficial online messaging service for official White House business, including with foreign contacts, his lawyer told the House Oversight Committee late last year.

The lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he was not aware if Mr. Kushner had communicated classified information on the service, WhatsApp, and said that because he took screenshots of the communications and sent them to his official White House account or the National Security Council, his client was not in violation of federal records laws.

In a letter disclosing the information, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee said that he was investigating possible violations of the Presidential Records Act by members of the Trump administration, including Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. He accused the White House of stonewalling his committee on information it had requested for months.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to stop disparaging the late Sen. John McCain, calling the Vietnam war hero “a dear friend” and defending him against the president’s criticisms. …

Ernst’s remarks came during a town hall meeting at a high school in Adel, Iowa, where several attendees voiced anger about Trump’s attacks about McCain. One attendee described McCain as a “genuine war hero” and called Trump’s comments about McCain “cowardly.”

“I do not appreciate his tweets,” Ernst said, when pressed by the attendee why she didn’t previously speak out more forcefully. “John McCain is a dear friend of mine. So, no I don’t agree with President Trump and he does need to stop.”

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.